Island domains: Country-code addresses are booming on the net

By Leslie Miller

WASHINGTON, D.C. (August 22, 2000 – USA Today) — Mahlon Smith has a little piece of tropical real estate in cyberspace – and he got it at a bargain price. The only problem: It’s in a neighborhood of the Net that many surfers don’t even know exists.

“When I’m reading my email address to somebody, they say, ‘Dot what?’” says Smith, 23, of Medford, Ore., whose email and Web addresses have a .nu suffix. “They’re already writing ‘dot-com.’ I have to explain it every time.

What Smith explains is that when the domain name system was created, in addition to a handful of generic domains such as .com, every country was assigned its own two-letter designation to administer as it wished. Smith’s .nu refers to the South Seas island of Niue, one of several that have recently contracted out registration to Western entrepreneurs.

Others include Tonga, the Cocos Islands, Western Samoa and Tuvalu. Some non-islands are making deals, too, such as Moldova in Easter Europe.

Because there’s no need to be in a country to use its code, entrepreneurs can market the suffixes (“country-code top-level domains”) as alternatives to dot-com. Plenty of names are available, unlike in dot-com land, where some say all the best ones are taken.

Their timing couldn’t be better: Domain name authorities said this month that they’ll solicit proposals for new generic top-level domains – .biz and .arts are among possibilities. Several additions could be announced early next year.

In the meantime, headlines about new names on the horizon are helping to increase awareness that dot-com is not the only name in town. And while country domains are not new, most of them are unfamiliar in the USA, where some codes – such as Tuvalu’s .tv and Moldova’s .md – have such appeal that they could easily be mistaken for new generics.

“When dot-TV showed up, you couldn’t ask for a better domain for us,” says Karsten Amlie, who’s in charge of Web properties for Pax TV, the largest broadcast TV station group in the USA. Pax re-launched its Web site last month at the Pax.tv address, and a marketing blitz is “putting Pax.tv everywhere,” Amlie says. The old address redirects visitors.

“DotTV is going to stand for the new Internet,” says Craig Frances of Pasadena, Calif.-based dotTV, which began registering names in the domain in April. “TV is the most recognizable two-letter symbol in the world,” while in many languages, “dot-com means nothing.”

Marketing country-code domains was the idea of Crown Prince Tupouto’a of Tonga, says Eric Lyons, co-founder of Tonic (Tonga Network Information Center).

Lyons’ former tech-firm co-worker Eric Gullichsen had moved to Tonga few years earlier and met the prince, also a techie. They became friends, and Gullichsen singed up the prince for the .to domain. Visiting Lyons in California in early 1997, they realized over dinner that “we were sitting on this real estate that could actually be valuable,” Lyons says.

Tonic Ltd. was formed, with the prince as majority shareholder, and has become a profitable small business, registering almost 50,000 names so far for $50 a year each. “People are recognizing other alternatives to .com,” Lyons says. About 70 resellers also distribute the .to domain.

Tonic supports a staff of five in California, but most of the profits go to Tonga, for building a school and other projects. The country, Lyons says, is “relatively primitive in just about every description,” the primary export is a type of squash popular in Japan.

“When the crop is bad, that’s bad for Tonga,” he says, but domain names are always in season.

Some entrepreneurs are far ahead of Tonic, such as the eNIC Corp. of Seattle, which has registered 300,000 names in the .cc domain (Cocos Islands) since late 1997. That makes .cc the third-largest country-code top-level domain, after Germany and the United Kingdom, says founder and CEO Brian Cartmell.

The former telecommunications industry consultant got in on the name game early and targeted .cc because it sounded generic and “appeared to be the most marketable worldwide.” He had public meetings to get support from the 650 residents and set up a local advisory board. “Back in 1997, it was first-come, first-served. No one was thinking about these things,” he says. Now, many are. Approximately 19 million domain names have been registered internationally, 12 million of those by Network Solutions, which registers names in the generic .com, .net and .org domains. But with 80% of all registrations in .com, other domains may find it hard to be heard.

“Dot-com has definitely become a brand in itself – in real estate terms, its Fifth Avenue,” says analyst Audrey Apfel of the Gartner Group in Stamford, Conn.

“Boutique” top-level domains may be trendy, but Apfel notes that a lot of their business is from companies that feel they must register trademarks in every available domain, just to prevent the expensive court battles that might ensue if others grab them to resell at a profit.

“People are making a lot of defensive choices,” Apfel says, and it’s likely only to escalate when new generic names appear. Even so, Mahlon Smith likes having a Net name that stays the same if he moves or changes Internet service providers.

“It’s kind of nice having a piece of the Internet to call your own,” Smith says. And soon, he hopes, when he tells his address to people, he won’t have to explain what’s “.nu.”